House Democrats are going to haul gun manufacturers in front of the Oversight Committee later this month, a continuation of their efforts to investigate and expose the proliferation of guns and gun violence following the spate of mass shootings in recent weeks. That includes the more than 220 people shot and killed just over the 4th of July weekend.
Chairperson Carolyn Maloney requested the CEOs of three major gun manufacturers—Marty Daniel, the CEO of Daniel Defense, Mark Smith, the president and CEO of Smith & Wesson Brands, and Christopher Killoy, the president and CEO of Sturm, Ruger & Co.—appear to discuss the companies’ profits from weapons based on AR-15-style guns, annual spending on advertising and marketing of these rifles, and their annual spending on federal and state lobbying, as well as their funding of the National Rifle Association.
Maloney is looking at evidence like this ad, which Smith & Wesson uses to try to get parents to arm their small children. “Lookout squirrels,” it proclaims, congratulating this child for “graduating” from a BB gun to a lethal weapon. It is helpfully translated into Spanish, as well.
The companies have provided financial information to the committee, and Maloney wants to delve into that. “The information you provided has heightened the Committee’s concern that your company is continuing to profit from the sale and marketing of weapons of war to civilians despite the harm these weapons cause, is failing to track instances or patterns where your products are used in crimes, and is failing to take other reasonable precautions to limit injuries and deaths caused by your firearms,” Maloney said in her letter to Killoy, provided to The Washington Post.
Likewise, she informed Smith that while his company has responded to her committee in part, “some of the information and documents responsive to our inquiry, but you have refused to produce information specifically regarding semiautomatic rifles based on the AR platform, despite admitting that you keep such records.”
House Democrats are looking at what can be done legislatively beyond the not-really-about-guns gun bill passed in June, the one that the U.S. Supreme Court basically nullified this session. Since President Joe Biden signed that bill, there have been well over two dozen mass shootings in the U.S.
Many, if not most Democrats still want to see assault-style weapons bans, including Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who traveled to Highland Park, Illinois Wednesday to mourn with survivors there. “We’ve got to be smarter as a country in terms of who has access to what, in particular assault weapons,” Harris said. “And we’ve got to take this stuff seriously. The whole nation should understand and have a level of empathy to understand that this could happen anywhere in any peace-loving community. And we should stand together and speak out about why it’s got to stop.”
Maybe putting the manufacturers on national television will help. Maybe making them describe how they sold nearly 20 million firearms in 2021 and 22.8 million firearms in 2020 and how much money they made off those sales, and how much they spent so they can keep flooding our streets with these weapons will help build the political will among the people who have the power to do something.
That something would be to call out the Republicans who are refusing all responsibility for the guns they’ve caused to proliferate. Maybe it will be enough to encourage Democrats to make Republicans stand on the House and Senate floors and vote against the measures the majority of Americans want them to pass.
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